Blog Post: A people with a land

As a wave of settlement expansion continues to wash over the Occupied Territories, the increasingly militant Palestinian-Israeli counter-response was evident at this year's week of Land Day demonstrations.

Identifying gentrification as a form of slow-motion ethnic cleansing, demonstrations in Jaffa targeted the 497 demolition notices issued against Palestinian homes. According to the Jaffa Popular Committee Against House Demolitions, the families evicted in this process will make room for upper class Jewish ones. It may have been no coincidence that in the same week, both Palestinian and Israeli activists took action against the mushrooming settlement and outpost boom.

Land Day commemorates the killing of six Palestinian-Israeli's during a general strike and mass protest against Israeli seizure of Arab land in the Galilee on March 30, 1976. Since the ‘October events' at the start of the Second Intifada when 13 Arabs were killed by Israeli forces in the area around Um al-Fahem, the traditionally Palestinian-Israeli event also taken root in the West Bank and Gaza. It marks both resistance to occupation and a shift in attitude towards Arabs who live on Israeli territory. In the years after 1948, Palestinian-Israelis were often viewed ambivalently by Palestinians across the green Line, while being distrusted by Israelis.

Yet both suffered from similar processes of ghettoisation and clearance. Since the large scale ethnic cleansing of 1948, Jaffa's Palestinian-Israelis have faced house demolitions, municipal discrimination and - since the 1970s - an express attempt to ‘Judaize' their neighbourhood. In the name of creating a ‘mixed city', Tel Aviv's mayor Shlomo Cheech Lahat took steps that engineered a Jewish majority in most of Jaffa's districts. According to activists from The Popular Committee, the process has recently become bound up with gentrification, especially in Palestinian neighborhood of Ajami.

"Gentrification here is not the same as in the rest of Tel Aviv," says Popular Committee activist Sami Bukhari, who's involved in a wider coalition fighting the developers across South Tel Aviv. "It's about the demolition of my history, my identity. It's stopping the development of the Jaffa community while transferring the population," he adds sipping a beer among the Hebrew-speaking, mostly Jewish Israelis of a Jaffa market café. Sitting on the second floor of the old Jaffa home-cum-café, Bukhari highlights the significance of mass organized community action coming back to the streets of Jaffa.

The March 28th, Land Day commemorations in the port city saw over 1000 people, mostly local residents along with a smattering of Tel Aviv solidarity activists take to the streets. As they marched past the proposed construction sites for Jaffa's new condos and high-rises, people chanted "We are here to stay."

It was Jaffa's first major demonstration since 2000, when hundreds of Palestinian-Israelis burned tyres and threw rocks in support of the uprising in the occupied territories. Afterwards, Palestinian Israeli towns and businesses became the target of an unofficial Jewish boycott.

"Our struggle is the struggle of today, it's not about nationalist memorials, it's about recognizing history and acting on it with social and economic justice," Popular Committee activist Fadi Shabita's told me in his office on Yeffet street in the heart of Palestinian Jaffa.

As the protest wound into a park just a block from Shbita's office, speeches from community organizations and solidarity activists focused on the racialized nature of Jaffa's real estate boom.

Significantly, Israeli-Jewish activists from Israel's Mizrahi (or Arab-Jewish) community were also present."This process is bringing in white people to force out black people. The state is acting on law without justice, so we have to take justice into our own hands," the former Israeli Black Panther Ruven Abarjil asserted, in a fiery speech in Hebrew.

Residents, many of whom were carrying Palestinian flags and keffiahs, appeared to be tying their struggle for housing with the wider issue of their Palestinian identity and its connection to Jaffa. "More than 90% of the Palestinians living in Jaffa are living in houses that they don't own," Shbita explained. Israel's Absentee Property Act of 1950 gave the state possession of Palestinian homes which had been emptied of residents during the 1948 war.

In the years that followed, Shbita says that the Tel Aviv municipality refused to grant building permits to Palestinians in Jaffa to even fix their homes. The 497 familiescurrently experiencing legal problems have been living in their homes for decades, many since 1948. Their Ottoman-era title deeds have frequently not been recognized by the municipal authorities.

Many Jaffa residents cite their historic ties to the land in challenging Israel's policy as a national, racial and class-based form of domination. As a result many see the gentrification as a form of colonialism. Yet on the surface, the struggle seems worlds away from West Bank challenges to settler expansion. While police in Jaffa held back, soldiers at Nabulus' Huwara checkpoint responded to demonstrations with teargas and stun grenades.

According to activist emails, Youtube footage and Israeli activist testimony, on April 2nd Israelis trying to help protect the the land of Badria Amar in the northern West Bank village of Qaddum were attacked by settlers and forced from the land. The army had been instructed to remove the settlers, but appeared to do nothing when settlers returned.

The land is recognized by Israel as being Palestinian-owned. However, according to one activist email about the settler attack, "this little [eviction] game has been played out some 10 times already." It's this sentiment of frustration that the Jaffa community has also seized on.